From Husserl to Artaud 1963–1964 141
subject of his choice. Derrida promised to think about it as soon as
he was freed from the busy exam period.
The months from April to July were indeed fully occupied by
Derrida’s university tasks. He had to set and mark several exams
at the Sorbonne, as well as prepare pupils at Normale Sup for the
agrégation (I will return to this in the next chapter); there were also
several bread-and-butter jobs to be done in those years. As Gérard
Genette relates:
In 1963 and later years, Jacques and I, like Jean Bellemin-
Noël and Élisabeth de Fontenay, would earn a bit of pocket
money by marking papers on ‘general knowledge’ (essays and
‘précis’ work) and acting as oral examiners for the same dis-
cipline for the entrance exam to the École de Hautes Études
Commerciales. There was a legend going round on campus that
Derrida often set as a subject ‘the yoghurt pot’, which – I don’t
know why – annoyed him greatly.^45It was also in the spring of 1964 that Derrida met a certain
Hélène Berger, who would soon be better known under the name
Hélène Cixous. She was to be one of his closest female friends for
forty years. She was an assistante in English at the University of
Bordeaux, and writing a thesis on James Joyce. On 11 April 1964,
she wrote to Derrida for the fi rst time, having read with both pleas-
ure and interest his Introduction to The Origin of Geometry as well
as his fi rst articles. She felt inevitably drawn to reading Joyce ‘from
a Husserlian point of view’. But although she was ‘a philosopher
at heart’, she was not a professional, and wanted to discuss with
Derrida several points that were giving her problems.^46
This fi rst ‘Joycean rendezvous’ took place on Saturday, 30 May
at the café Le Balzar, ‘the public bar being the Joycean place par
excellence – where all knots are untied and all puzzles solved’.^47 On
this occasion, Hélène Cixous realized that Derrida had a real passion
for Joyce that went far beyond the few lines he had published about
him at the time. But they discovered that they had several other
points in common, including their origins: Cixous had been born
in Oran to an Ashkenazi mother and a Sephardi father, and grew
up in Algiers, where she frequented the same places as Derrida in
his youth: the Jardin d’Essai, the Lycée Bugeaud, and many others.
They felt equally close when they talked about their experiences in
the French university system and its hidebound ways. ‘When I met
Derrida, I was at war with the institution,’ she remembers.
As I talked with him, I told myself that there must be other
people of his calibre in the French academic system, people
who were determined to shake things up. But I very soon